Daily Briefing: Wednesday 11th August

Shareholder group slams Activision Blizzard's "inadequate" response to lawsuit

SOC Investment Group, an active Activision Blizzard shareholder group and firm advocates for ethical business practices, have issued a letter to company management stating that their attempts to improve corporate culture have been severely lacking. The letter highlights that, while the tone of Activision Blizzard's responses have certainly improved, the changes laid out by Bobby Kotick don't "go nearly far enough."

• Readers will likely know SOC Investment Group better as CtW Investment Group - they rebranded recently. CtW rose to prominence last year when they waged a consistent war against compensation packages at both Activision Blizzard and EA, with Activision Blizzard's latest scandal providing them with even more momentum. Their letter calls on Activision Blizzard's leadership to reform hiring practices, claw back bonuses from confirmed abusers, and replace WilmerHale as outside auditors.

Typhoon Studios are back with a new name and Tencent backing

Typhoon Studios were an indie studio founded back in 2017 by a bunch of ex-AAA talent with experience across companies like EA and Ubisoft. They were acquired by Google and brought into the Stadia fold just before the release of their debut title - colourful sci-fi shooter Journey to the Savage Planet. The game released on most platforms at the start of 2020 and the Stadia version launched in January this year - just before Google shuttered all internal Stadia development, closed the studio, and laid everyone off.

• Raccoon Logic are a new studio made up of around 75% ex-Typhoon Studios staff and, thanks to some surprisingly successful negotiations with Google, full ownership of the Journey to the Savage Planet IP. Google also handed over all the studio's previously in-progress works so the new Raccoon Logic team are essentially able to pick up where they left off back in February. Oh, and they have minority financial backing from Tencent - because of course they do.

Halo Infinite was just rated in Australia

The Australian Classification board has officially rated both Halo Infinite and Forza Horizon 5, and the hope is that a definite release date for Halo now isn't too far off. Forza Horizon 5 is already confirmed to be releasing on November 9th and was rated on August 3rd - does Halo Infinite being rated a week later mean a mid-November release date?

• For a release date that must surely be closing in, Microsoft have been frustratingly coy about announcing anything. The closest we've really had to an announcement was Phil Spencer confirming in a podcast back in June that the game will "absolutely" be releasing during the Holiday 2021 release window. At the time, Spencer said that Microsoft have an idea of the "three-to-four-week range" the game will be releasing in, but there are other release factors at play that made a firm date difficult to decide. Watch this space.